Jonathan's thoughts about just about anything

Kiwanis Family

Well, the draft for this post has been sitting around since August of last year, so I thought I might as well publish it now. I’ve included roughly what I had saved, a few cleanups, and then a section at the end that goes over some slightly more modern thoughts I had. Eight-month-ago Jonathan knew nothing…

This summer, I have had the amazing chance to work at Fog Creek Software on a product called Trello (trello.com). To give a really quick summary, Trello is a great way of managing to do lists (or other kinds of lists), and includes a lot of nice features for working with teams. In addition to working on it, and using it for work, I have started to use it a lot more for personal things. One of the areas I am getting the most use out of Trello lately has been for Circle K. Trello has done a great job of helping me keep up-to-date with my work as a Subregion C trustee, but I honestly don’t think that is where it is the most useful. It offers a lot to help you stay useful as an individual, but can do even more for helping Circle Ks stay organized as a group.

Subregion C

I guess the best place to start talking would be about how I use Trello for Subregion C business. I have my Trello board split into a variety of lists: Communication Points, TODO, Notepad, and Transition Items. Moving from left to right, Communication Points is where I keep information on the people and groups I talk to. I have a card that just stays in the list for every person I talk to on a regular basis, and I keep the cards updated with a check-list of everything I have thought to ask the person about. When the checklist gets too long, I make sure to schedule a meeting and then leave a comment on the card about what we talked about. This helps me make sure that I am not needlessly bothering people, and also makes sure I have things to talk to people about when I get the chance, and I have a central place with notes about what we talked about. There are also notes here for things like meetings and emails, just to help me stay on top of those too. (for another perspective on what I’m trying to accomplish with this first list, see http://blog.trello.com/using-trello-for-impromptu-meetings/)

The next list is by far the most boring one, TODO. This is probably the most traditional list, I just stick cards in here, with actual due dates, for things I need to take care of. Whenever I find free time, I just look at what is at the top of that list and work on it. This list has included things such as getting bylaws from the Kiwanis staff or writing updates for board meetings. Past that list, the other two are for me just making notes. The first, Notepad, is just where I leave notes that I want to be able to refer back to. This has included things like my personal notes about what we talked about at committee meetings, to some cool ideas for service projects that I think I might want to refer back to latelr (actually, to be totally honest, that is all that is in the list). The final list, transition items, is just about the same thing, however, I’m making these notes for whoever comes after me instead of myself. Honestly, I just wanted a place I could put things I knew should be in my packet without having to be too much on top of things and start my packet.

Committees/Boards

Now, Trello is great for helping me stay organized personally, however, I think it is much more useful for working with groups of people. One place I used it in the past was for the Technology Committee in the Circle K club at the University of Michigan. The Trello board gave us a good way to organize what projects people were working on without me needing to constantly be bothering everyone (or, at least, that was the idea). For this, we kept a couple lists that were cool ideas we knew we would eventually want to work on. Once we decided that an idea was good enough (and we had the necessary time/experience), someone would pick it off of a list, and start working on it (by moving it to another list and joining the card). Finally, once a feature actually got added to the website, the card would get dragged to a list representing what was done each month, which was helpful when I was working on my MRFs. This was a great tool for me when trying to figure out what people were working on, as well as for when people (finally) finished whatever they were working on and needed something else to do.

For the tech committee, Trello fit extremely nicely (using it pretty much exactly how trello.com/dev is set up), however, this is not how most committees within the club function, or how any boards (yeah, not referring to Trello boards here oddly) function. When I joined the K-Fam committee at the beginning of the summer, I set up my own personal board to help me keep track of what I was doing. It ended up looking a lot like my board for Sub-C stuff (two columns, “Communication Points” and “TODO”), and feel free to draw ideas from that. If I was setting that up for the whole committee, I’d end up using the same idea, but there are a couple more things I’d add that do not apply to me. First, I’d add a column for weekly projects like helping out at the Kiwanis Thrift Sale, or going to meetings of the local Builders Club. These would function pretty much exactly like communication points (leaving a comment whenever you did something relative to the project), however, it would be a more specific place to look when thinking about updates for the projects. Next, since the committee handles a bunch of non-regular projects, I would make a separate list for those. There are some Circle K events (e.g. Service Day) that may be able to make use of their own separate board, however, I don’t think anything more than a card is necessary for most things.

Modern Comments

I thought I would come back and leave some comments (past the cleaning up and rewriting that I did above) based on the extra eight months of life experiences I have now.

First of all, regarding the Sub-C Trello Board, I have continuously referred to it throughout the year. That said, there were a bunch of things that I became a lot less diligent about taking care of, most notably notes from meetings. I wish I still did as good as a job with these as I did at the beginning of the year, however, laziness kind of took over and my notes became hastily scrawled on paper instead of the organized masterpieces they were before (yeah, I fail at notes in general, but they were much closer to masterpieces at the start). As far as the K-Fam stuff, UofM’s Circle K did eventually try out Trello, and I made the K-Fam board conform to pretty much exactly what I said…and no one used it. Trello is a fantastic service, however, it’s pretty much useless if no one gets on-board with it and I’m sad that there was not a stronger push towards that than what we had.

I hope that you got some good ideas about how to use Trello from this post. For me, it is a nice tool for staying organized, and I think it has the potential to help a lot more people out with that. If your Circle K is not using it already, I completely encourage you to try it, it can be a huge asset for your club, or any subset of your club.

This weekend, I took a trip to Wisconsin for the Wisconsin-Upper Michigan Circle K’s DCON. It was a very different experience from any DCON I had been to in the past (i.e. Michigan Key club and Michigan Circle K) and I wanted to talk about why I decided to go as well as what the convention itself was like. The idea for this started as a much shorter overview post talking about what the differences were, and I might still do that later, but I ended up writing out enough that this is pretty much a play-by-play of the entire weekend. In other news, I succeeded in doing a lot of writing this weekend. Now all I need to do is make this writing more productive.

A year ago, another member of our club had talked about how she wanted to go to the convention. I was quickly talked into going (it was a Kiwanis-Family event, there was not much more I needed to hear than that) and was pretty sad when I was not able to go (I ended up running out of people to ask to go with me last year and did not feel like driving to it on my own). This year, after I realized that it was feasible to go, I decided I would definitely be going to the convention. Looking at the weekend, it seemed kind of infeasible to spend ten hours driving but that problem was easily solved by using the Amtrak to get there. I ended up having to cancel going to see the Lion King in Detroit but going to the convention was worth it.

To start with getting there, the train ride was an absolute blast. To the best of my knowledge it is the longest train ride I have been on but it did not feel long at all. On the train to Chicago, I sat alone for most of the trip which made it much easier to work on homework. Once we passed the Kalamazoo stop, the train filled up completely which made working on homework a bit more difficult. I still managed and got over half of my networking homework on the ride there. Between getting homework done and a train being more fun than driving, taking a train was one of the best decisions I made for this trip. Once we left Chicago heading to Wisconsin, the train ride was pretty similar to the first one, except a bit slower and much shorter. I arrived in Wisconsin in the early afternoon and met up with the fantastic WUM district!

When I got to the hotel, the WUM board was about to start doing script run-throughs. On a side note, this is something that I would really like to see Michigan do in the future to make our DCON seem more organized. Anyways, I started helping out with setting up some decorations until it was time for opening session. The first thing that WUM did at their opening session (after the board had a very epic musical entrance) was to have each club present a skit. These ranged from a comical presentation of an award for not having a skit to absolutely intense musical numbers. One club (Edgewood) even tried to do a live version of the Harlem Shake. I understood it about as well as I understand the video versions and it did seem to be lacking something. Once that was done, we went through nominations which were surprisingly painful. WUM follows the practice that the governor must ask “Are there any further nominations for the position of _______” thrice without anyone saying anything. This made nominations drag on nearly forever.

With the opening sessions over, we embarked upon something that can best be described as a service scavenger hunt. This was an awesome event where we ran between seven different stations with a service project at each of them. The entire time, we were trying to unscramble a message made up of letters given to us at each station. At the end, after doing some awesome projects, we discovered the theme for WUM’s Spring Fling 2013: “Serving at the speed of light”. The whole service scavenger hunt did a fantastic job of serving as both an icebreaker and community service so I was thrilled to be a part of it and will be trying to use that idea back in Michigan at some point.

After we finished the service, it was time for caucusing. I enjoyed watching the candidates and noticed the main difference between WUM and Michigan was how literature was presented. In WUM, each candidate is responsible for making and bringing their own literature while, in Michigan, we simply distribute a packet with a single page for each candidate. After caucusing, we went back to the room and talked about the candidates for a while. The discussion we had about candidates, as well as watching the candidates, helped me to gain a much better idea of what people are looking for during caucusing and I new feel more prepared to caucus myself.

Saturday morning began with a House of Delegates session (not noteworthy) which was immediately followed by some amazing workshops. The first workshop I went to was about how to run an engaging club meeting. It was present by Lena and Jo, both of whom had a good grasp on what made a meeting good and were able to talk about it in an interesting way. They began with examples of good and bad ways to run a meeting (had everyone walk out into the hall and then walk back in as if we were prospective new members) which really helped to get the point across about why it was important to do meetings well. After that, they went over some icebreaker ideas (my personal favorite was called “Do you want to buy a duck?”), talked about how to use technology, discussed bringing speakers in, and talked about some great social ideas. The workshop was very well-done and helpful, but was nothing compared to the next workshop I attended.

My second workshop was on team-building and was presented by Jane Erickson, the Kiwanis International Board Councilor for Circle K and Cody, the Subregion C trustee. They did an absolutely fantastic job going through three extremely fun team-building activities. The first activity we did was to shake hands with five people and to learn their names (there was more to it, I am not going to give full details for any of these). The next activity was to close our eyes and fallow her instructions for how to fold and pip a sheet of paper. When everyone ended up with completely different-looking sheets of paper, it did a great job of illustrating the problems we can often face when trying to communicate. The next activity was to put a rope around our wrists, link up with a partner, and try to get the ropes separated. My partner and I spent a lot of time trying to get this to work, even after we had the solution demonstrated to us. Once we finally got it to work, we both had to do it a couple more times before we believed that it was legitimately working. Finally, we did an activity with the same person to put our hands behind our back, pull out some number of fingers, and then be the first one to say the sum number of fingers. This workshop was able to present some new team-building activities that would be easy to do with other groups and make us think about different aspects of leadership at the same time. I went into the workshop having met Jane that morning and thinking a workshop with her would be interesting but I did not expect to walk out of it with that high of an opinion.

After the workshops, the next event on the schedule was the K-Family Eliminate Project lunch. This started with a showing of one of the Kiwanis ICON videos and then switched between the MCs (oh, yeah, each event had two board members serving as MCs) talking about a country where MNT had recently been eliminated and a K-Family member talking about his/her experiences in the family. The Eliminate presentations were not terrible but the K-Family members definitely stole the show. Some of the presenters were a K-Kid getting up to the microphone and telling her advisor that the advisor does not get to decide everything (“No! It is called K-Kids“), a Builders Club member getting up to the microphone and saying something similar to “Let’s do this” (I forget his exact wording) before beginning his speech, and a Circle K alumni talking about a crazy 5-hour board bonding canoe trip which involved the canoe running aground multiple times. All these presenters did a fantastic job, and a good number of them were absolutely adorable while giving the presentation.

After a simple caucusing session and a bit of service, it was time for the big recognition events. It started with a Governor’s and Administrator’s reception where most of the outstanding district officer awards were presented. Following that, their was the Presidents’ and Parents’ banquet. For WUM, most of the board members walked in escorted by their parents which was extremely touching to watch. We had a fantastic dinner (it was definitely among the best I have had at a K-Fam convention) followed by an even more fantastic keynote.

The keynote speaker for the convention was Jane Erickson, the same person who had presented the second workshop I went to. She shared some great stories that really captured what it meant to be in the Kiwanis Family and why the work we do is important. I left the room feeling emotional and inspired, something that is not the norm for me and keynotes. I know I am not alone in that sentiment and I really hope that Michigan can look into having her come to our convention sometime in the future.

After the dinner, there was the awesome talent show competition where clubs (or in one case, a division) got together and presented a skit of some kind. The talents included, among others, a Dr. Seuss book, a massive song-and-dance number that I believe was based on the movie “Pitch Perfect” (still need to see it), and an entire division having a huge rap battle. The amount of work that must have gone into each of the acts was astonishing, it completely blew away th skits from the previous day (at the time, I had wondered if those would be on Youtube so I could show Michigan). After the talent show, there was the dance. I ended up leaving that early because, well, dances… I went back to the room, talked for a couple hours, drifted in and out of sleeping and listening for a while, and then went to bed (this weekend was not at all good for my sleep schedule).

Sunday morning, it was finally time for the main event of the weekend: House of Delegates (the real one). I was absolutely thrilled to hear the announcement of the governor results but the rest of the house was pretty uninteresting. Hearing the credentials chair chair make a motion after each individual resolution (but not have seconds be asked for or voting be done) was mildly amusing, but not much else was amusing.

Finally, it was time for the closing session (i.e. crying time). The board was very well-bonded and emotional and it really was inspiring hearing Morgan talk about many of the things she had gone through. She gave some amazingly touching awards to all of her presidents along with some board members, Kiwanians, and family. Knowing some of the people she was recognizing, it was very touching hearing the presentations and I actually almost cried once (during a presentation of a black diamond (referred to by the rest of the world as a governor’s appreciation award) to Emily). At 1PM, the session was done and WUMCON was sadly over.

The train ride back home was about the same as the one there, except later and nicer. I grabbed a business class ticket for the Chicago-Ann Arbor leg of the journey and this was reasonably nicer. I got to board first (and was guaranteed to be facing forwards), was not sitting next to anyone, had more leg room (and a more comfy chair overall), got a comped beverage, and was given a free copy of the Chicago Tribune (not that interesting of a newspaper unfortunately). Overall, I would say it is definitely worth the extra twenty dollars to get business class on Amtrak and would recommend it for anyone traveling with them in the future.

This weekend was absolutely fantastic. I got to spend time with some amazing friends, meet some new ones, and then steal a lot of great ideas for future Michigan DCONs. I felt welcome at all times and really enjoyed talking to all of the WUM members. In addition to the actual convention activities, I had a nice chance to talk to some people I really respect about my personal activities for next year and I am now more excited than ever. We only have a month left before Michigan’s DCON and I cannot wait to see if we can manage to give WUM a run for their money.

I think just about everyone has, at some point, done the values activity. The general idea is that you write down your top N values on sheets of paper and continuously narrow them down until you are left with only M values remaining. I first did this when I was in High School at a Key Leader event and since then have done it quite a few times. I am going to talk about some of the ways it has been done and comment on what worked and what did not.

The first way I did it, at the Key Leader event, worked fairly well. There was a paper at the front of the room with the values on them and you were asked to walk up and put your values in the ring. We started with the outer rings and moved towards the center after each round of giving up values. After it was over the facilitator pointed out how willing we were to give up our values at first and how much harder it became. She also pointed out that we still were willing to give them up despite her never using language that said it was mandatory. Everything was done well, but nothing was done spectacularly.

The most recent time I did this activity was at a student-let event for Circle K. This honestly was the worst time I have ever seen this done. We wrote each value on a sheet of paper (lead up was similar to “write your values on these ten slips of paper”) and were then told to keep choosing a smaller number of values. At the end, we were simply asked to hand our remaining value to someone walking around the room collecting them. This activity did not create though, it did not encourage us to reflect on what it was we valued, it simply got a sample of what it was that many people in our club valued and allowed for a word cloud to be shown at the end. This is an activity that is capable of having a lot of impact upon people and I really did not like seeing us go through it so hastily.

The best time I have ever seen the activity done was at Circle K Leadership Academy. We started with the normal writing of the values, but there was an added emphasis of how we selected each value. After we had the values written, we moved into discarding them, into a large bin. We wandered around the room, dropping our values into the bin as we did so. While we were doing this, the facilitator read off some of the values stating, for example, “Someone chose to give up honesty”, really giving us a chance to think about what we personally treasure. As he read off values I still had, it gave me pause knowing that there were people for whom these were not important. At the end, we had a chance to think about what we had done. Everything at that event worked perfectly and it is the example of how the activity should be run.

This is an outstanding activity that can get a lot of thought out of people. If you are leading it, please make sure that you give it the attention it deserves and put a lot of effort into how it can impact people.

On Monday, I am going to be leaving for Leadership Academy. This is a week long leadership conference designed specifically for members of Circle K (on a side note, it is based off of a book by Brendon Burchard (I have read one book written by him and have another that I am meaning to read)). Everyone I know who has gone through the program says it is a life-changing experience and that they would not trade it for anything. Wth that in mind, I am extremely excited and cannot wait to experience what they have described. The rush of positive energy surrounding the program is overwhelming and it is incredibly difficult for me to avoid deciding how the event went before even going (and judging from the Facebook page for this year, I am not the only one having trouble avoiding that). At this point, I am just trying to put off my judgement until after the event and keep up my excitement for it at the same time.

While I am undoubtedly excited for the event, there are still a couple things I am worried about. The first of these is the fact that I will have absolutely no access to technology for a week. This could not came at a worse time for me work-wise with my boss having been gone the past two weeks and just returning on Monday. I know that logically I will probably not be needed but I would still like to be there if for no reason other than to make sure everything we did on Friday gets finished correctly. Outside of work, the general backlog of email that I expect to see after being gone for a week is just terrifying and something that I am not looking forward to. Finally, it seems like there might be a problem with the passwords on the University of Michigan Circle K website at the moment and I am not sure I completely tracked down the problem before leaving.

I am hoping I can avoid focusing on all of these trivial concerns and be able to just throw myself into LA. Precedent indicates that I will not be able to avoid focusing upon my day-to-day concerns but I am trusting in this week to be different and I am trusting in myself to be better than I am. I hope I end up looking back on it with the same level of enthusiasm that past attendees do (maybe towards the less cult-like side of the spectrum) and I hope I gain as much from it as I think is possible.